Add a complete SD card font subsystem that enables users to install and
use custom fonts beyond the three built-in families. This combines the
back-end firmware support (#1327) with the font configuration, build
pipeline, CI distribution, and user-facing management UI (#1392).
Core font system:
- Custom .cpfont binary format (v4) with multi-style support (regular,
bold, italic, bold-italic) packed into a single file per size
- On-demand glyph loading from SD card with two-pass prewarm rendering
to bulk-read glyphs per page, achieving near-flash performance for
Latin text (~697ms vs ~681ms) and viable CJK rendering (~32% slower)
- Persistent advance cache for layout measurement without SD I/O
- Overflow ring buffer for glyph cache misses during rendering
- Memory-conscious design: only advance tables kept in RAM; glyph
bitmaps, kern tables, and ligatures loaded on demand from SD
Font management:
- On-device WiFi download from GitHub Releases with manifest-based
discovery, install/update detection, and progress UI
- Web interface font upload, listing, and deletion via /fonts page
- Manual SD card copy to /fonts/ or /.fonts/ directories
- Font selection integrated into Settings > Reader > Font Family
Build pipeline:
- Declarative YAML config (sd-fonts.yaml) as single source of truth
for the 17-family font library (serif, sans, mono, accessibility)
- Python converter (fontconvert_sdcard.py) for TTF/OTF to .cpfont with
FreeType rasterization, class-based kerning, and ligature extraction
- Parallel build orchestrator with variable font instance extraction
- CI workflow publishing versioned + stable releases to a dedicated
crosspoint-fonts repository with auto-incrementing revision tags
- Centralized version constants (cpfont_version.py) shared across
build tooling and CI, with firmware headers as manual sync points
Additional fixes:
- CJK characters no longer get hyphens inserted at line breaks
- Advance table eliminates 30+ second stalls during CJK section
indexing for paragraphs with >512 unique codepoints
Closes#930
Co-authored-by: Zach Nelson <zach@zdnelson.com>
Co-authored-by: Justin <itsthisjustin@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: jpirnay <jens@pirnay.com>
Co-authored-by: mcrosson <kemonine@kemonine.info>
## Purpose
This PR includes some preparatory changes that are needed for an
upcoming performant CJK font feature. The changes have no impact on
render time and heap allocation for latin text. **Despite this, I think
these changes stand on their own as a better font
compression/decompression implementation.**
## Summary
- Font decompressor rewrite: Replaced the 4-slot LRU group cache with a
two-tier system — a page buffer (glyphs prewarmed before rendering
begins) and a hot-group fallback (last decompressed group retained for
non-prewarmed
glyphs).
- Byte-aligned compressed bitmap format: Glyph bitmaps within compressed
groups are now stored row-padded rather than tightly packed before
DEFLATE compression, improving compression ratios by making identical
pixel rows produce
identical byte patterns. Glyphs are compacted back to packed format on
demand at render time. Reduces flash size by 155 KB.
- Page prewarm system: Added `Page::collectText` and
`Page::getDominantStyle` to extract per-style glyph requirements before
rendering, and `GfxRenderer::prewarmFontCache` to pre-decompress only
the groups needed for the dominant style
— eliminating mid-render decompression for the common case.
- UTF-8 robustness fixes: `utf8NextCodepoint` now validates continuation
bytes and returns a replacement glyph on malformed input;
`ChapterHtmlSlimParser` correctly preserves incomplete multi-byte
sequences across word-buffer flush
boundaries rather than splitting them.
---
### AI Usage
While CrossPoint doesn't have restrictions on AI tools in contributing,
please be transparent about their usage as it
helps set the right context for reviewers.
Did you use AI tools to help write this code? _**YES**_ Architecture and
design was done by me, refined a bit by Claude. Code mostly by Claude,
but not entirely.
